Bach's schematic, as it appears on the page
LaripS.com, © Bradley Lehman, 2005-9, all rights reserved.
All musical/historical analysis here on the LaripS.com web site is the personal opinion of the author,
as a researcher of historical temperaments and a performer of Bach's music.

Responses to other people's published articles and books about this tuning

November 2006: I have prepared detailed responses to articles in the November issue of Early Music. Each response has its own page.

Duffin book November 2006: Ross W Duffin's new book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, And Why You Should Care gives a good presentation of this temperament, along with broader musical issues for non-keyboard instruments. W W Norton, ISBN 10: 0-393-06227-9, ISBN 13: 978-0-393-06227-4.

See also Duffin's web letter to readers of the book offering listening examples: comparing this Bach temperament with equal temperament, in music by Wagner/Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, and Gershwin.

  • December 2007: My response to Miklos Spanyi's article "Kirnberger's Temperament and its Use in Today's Musical Praxis" (May 2007) is on the Bach temperaments page. It does take a gratuitous shot at my temperament, in an outrageously funny and meaningless endnote (that it's like being stuck in economy class, cramped next to a fat person!), but my main objections to the article are both musical and historical.... There is also a YouTube video where I demonstrate how this Kirnberger temperament sounds in Bach's music in C major.
  • July 2008: My response to Peter Williams's newest book, J. S. Bach: A Life in Music (Cambridge, 2007), is on the Bach temperaments page. He makes some thin (and untenable) assertions about retuning the instrument from piece to piece when studying the WTC, and about this "not requiring great skill". But, it doesn't address the fact that most of the preludes and fugues in the WTC go beyond 12 different notes, each, in their enharmonic requirements!
  • August 2008: Response to Bernhard Billeter's article "Zur 'Wohltemperirten' Stimmung von Johann Sebastian Bach: Wie hat Bach seine Cembali gestimmt?" (Ars Organi, March 2008, pp 18-21).


Return... Bach's schematic, rotated for use